Red Sox righty Brandon Workman has undergone Tommy John surgery, the club announced (via Tim Britton of the Providence Journal, on Twitter). Workman had yet to see action this year after suffering an elbow strain late in the spring.
Workman, 26, looked to be a useful arm for the club after spending significant time at the big league level over the last two seasons. He threw 128 2/3 innings between 2013-14, splitting his time between the rotation and pen duty. All said Workman owns a 5.11 ERA with 8.2 K/9 against 3.6 BB/9 in the big leagues.
Needless to say, Workman will be out all of this year and most (if not all) of next. As WEEI.com’s Ryan Hannable explained earlier in the year, Workman was added to the major league DL, meaning that he will accrue big league service for this year and whatever portion of 2016 he spends rehabbing. With 1.018 years of service entering the season, he could end up qualifying for arbitration after 2016 even if he does not throw a pitch for the Red Sox next year.
Not to mention he’s getting paid a major league salary the whole time.
That seemed like an awful lot of down time before deciding on surgery. He hasn’t pitched at all this year and it was obvious he had problems months ago.
They tried a platelet rich plasma injection first. Apparently it didn’t work. They needed time to see if it would.
He should be about 4 months into his rehab by now.
too bad next year will be a wasted year for him.
Thats too bad, he seems like a nice kid. There are way too many players getting TJ surgery, its mind boggling just how many each year.
For the life of me, I’ll never understand why it takes so long to figure these things out sometimes. There’s another whole year wasted for this guy. Maybe it’s like the Tanaka situation. Nobody will ever really know. Hope he comes back healthy.